The Logos Bible Software Blog has an interesting post on performing syntactical searches in the Hebrew Bible with their Andersen�Forbes Analyzed Text of the Hebrew Bible (A-F) database. Unfortuantly, A-F is only currently available as part of their Logos 3.0 beta version (and I am not sure I want to install a beta version!). Here is the link:

Syntax: VSO, VOS, SVO, SOV, OVS, OSV

It is quite exciting to see a number of new syntactical tools for study of the Hebrew Bible. Now there is not only the Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible for Logos (see my blog post here), there is this new Andersenâ€?Forbes database. טוב מ×?ד

Ben Witherington offers some excellent guidance on blog posting etiquette (“blogiquette” anyone? How’s that for a neologism!). He proffers a rudimentary set of rules for bloggers to consider before they post: On Speaking Privately in Public — on Blogs

Here is an excerpt where he states his premise:

Doubtless most of us have been there. You are stuck in an airport waiting for a flight, and at least four or five private conversations are going on around you. Now its one thing when the other person is there and you are talking to them. That’s all fine. But suppose you are in a quiet space, like some airports have set up for laptop users and the like— and someone breaks out the cellphone and begins talking at the top of his or her voice? This is having a private conversation in public, in a manner that is rude and obnoxious, ignoring and being oblivious to the fact that there are others around who might not want to hear what is being said. Though we have all endured this in one form or another, we now have a new form of public rudeness of this sort– on blogs.

Witherington provides some excellent rules of thumb to consider before you click the “publish post” button. That being said, the analogy between overhearing a private conversation in public breaks down since blogs are not really public in the same way as a conversation in a public place. While anyone may read a blog, to do so they have to decide to go to URL to read it. If you don’t like what someone says in their blog, you can just not go there.

Nonetheless, an excellent post for all to consider.

At my wife’s beckoning, I had to take a quick break from my marking (have I mentioned how much I love marking…) to clear the corpse of a mouse from a trap. Mouse number three has felt the cold hard steel of my expandable trigger mouse trap.

This infuses the traditional “T’was the Night before Christmas” poem with new meaning: “all through the house not a creature was stirring living, not even a mouse”!

Stay tuned for some more mouse facts as soon as I finish grading… the end is nigh!

This was recently posted on the ANE list. Good food for thought, IMHO.

I have for some time been concerned about the character of the discussion on [insert academic forum of your choice here] as is typified in this string (and so many others). I’ve spent much of my life hanging around academia. I went to grad school for 20 years at three institutions. I finished two masters degrees and a terminal degree. I put a couple of decades into research. I’ve taught for a decade, and I’ve attended a lot of conferences. Through the years, I’ve met a lot of people with doctorates and lesser degrees. I’ve met a lot of teachers and a few real scholars. One thing that I’ve learned through the years is that real scholars are usually humble and gentle people. They are low key because the evidence drives them to it. Real scholars understand how weak any case is and how limited any grasp of the evidence can be. I’ve also met a great many people who try very hard to make other people think that they are smart. They are wannabees no matter how their resumes may read and no matter what status they may have grabbed for themselves. I’ve seen some wannabees treated with a level of respect that borders on awe because of their sales skills, while I’ve seen some real scholars largely ignored because they don’t try to sell themselves.

– Rodger Dalman (reproduced with permission)

OK, so I’m in the middle of finishing up my semester marking. All in all it is a mundane part of the instructor’s job that I don’t really like. But every once and a while there are bright spots like great essays or exams, etc.

I just finished marking a final exam essay for my introductory Old Testament/Hebrew Bible course where the student incorporated numerous titles to U2 songs throughout the essay! I got quite a chuckle out of that! And it was a good essay to boot! (I make my class aware of my fondness for U2 when we talk about lament psalms and modern laments — I use some U2 songs as examples of modern laments).

OK, so I set up the mouse traps yesterday (see here) and we went out to a friend’s house in the evening (a mouse free house) and when we came back we found two mice caught in traps (my four-year-old son exclaimed, “wow, cool” and was going around today saying that we’re mouse killers!).

Two down and who knows how many to go!

So, while I have been trying to “think like a mouse” I decided to do some more research. This time, however, I decided to do some biblical research! Did you know that mice occur in the Hebrew Bible? There are actually six places were we find our furry little friends: Lev 11:29, 1Sam 6:4, 5, 11, 18, and Isa 66:17. The first instance includes mice among various unclean “swarming things that swarm on the earth,” along with weasels and lizards. The references in 1 Samuel are to the gold mice that the Philistines made and sent back with the Ark, while the Isaiah reference also includes them with other unclean animals. What I find interesting is the way the various translations render the Hebrew term for mouse (עַכְבָּר). Almost all translations consistently render the word as mouse. The NIV, however, always translates it as “rat”, while the NLT renders it was mouse in Leviticus and Isaiah, but rat in 1 Samuel. I’m not sure if there is really enough data to go on to know how exactly to render it, though I wonder if the NIV’s translation is more to vilify the animal?

Stay tuned to see what tomorrow may bring…

P.S. Make sure to read the comments to my original posts (here) — Joe Cathey provides an interesting Texan approach to dealing with mice infestation!

Time Magazine has announced its “Persons of the Year” and Bono gets the nod, along with Melinda and Bill Gates. Here is the introduction from the article:

The Good Samaritans

By Nancy Gibbs
For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are TIME’s Persons of the Year.

Read the full article here (log-in required).

My dear wife just informed me that when she left for her workout this morning that she saw a mouse. No, I am not talking about a computer mouse, nor am I talking about Mickey Mouse. I am talking about a house mouse — the dreaded mus musculus!

This said mouse was seen trespassING on our garage — our attached garage — of our new home. Then she informed me that she had noticed some holes in our garbage bags (in the garage) the last couple weeks.

Well, mice can be cute. I’ve always liked the mice in Disney’s Cinderella (though they should have went for speech therapy as a kids like I did!), and who hasn’t been amused by the three blind mice or Roquefort the Mouse in the Aristocats?

That being said, I prefer my mice to be animated or connected to my computer. The first thing I did when informed about our possible infestation is research (I’m an academic, what can I say?!). The web is an excellent resource for the budding exterminators. One of the most valuable pieces of advice I came across for far is the following:

To control mice, you must “think like a mouse”

If only I had some Mickey Mouse ears… I would be wearing them now! Another web site recommended the “shock and awe” approach:

It’s better to trap intensively for a few days than to set only a few traps for a long time. Place the traps within travel routes, in corners, or near holes or nests. Traps set in pairs are more effective than single traps. A dab of crunchy peanut butter on the trigger is an enticing lure.

OK, I’m off to HomeDepot to pick up some “expandable trigger” mouse traps (did you know research has demonstrated they are more effective than traditional mouse traps?) and then to the grocery store for some crunchy peanut butter! (Maybe I’ll get some bananas too… I’m in the mood for a peanut butter and banana sandwich).

The game’s afoot… I will keep you updated!

Just after I started my blog last April, Joel Ng hosted the first ever “Biblical Studies Carnival” at Ebla Logs. After that things went omniously silent at Ebla Logs… the last post was on April 7, 2005. Then in August 2005 Peter Kirby at Christian Origins blog announced the “Biblical Studies Carnival 2” and accepted submissions, but nothing ever materialized.

At any rate, I’m wondering what people think about establishing a regular “Biblical Studies Carnival”?

If you are wondering what a blog “carnival” is, first things first I should clarify that a “carnival” in the blogosphere has no clowns (well, at least literal clowns!) nor is it related to Mardi Gras. The way I would envision it, the Biblical Studies carnival would be a regular (once a month? every two weeks?) rotating carnival where one blogger sums up the best blog articles in the area of academic biblical studies in the given period of time. Blog articles may be submitted by their authors or be nominated by someone else. Then the host blogger would evaluate the submitted posts and write a post describing and interacting with the entries (with links). Some carnivals will group entries following different themes, while others go through the entries in order of submission (I personally find the ones that try to organize them around topics or themes more interesting).

In regards to the focus of the carnival, I would think the blog entries would have to be:

• Academic. Not that the posts have to be written by an academic, PhD, or professor, just that they represent an academic approach to the discipline rather than, for instance, a devotional approach.
• Broadly focused on discipline of biblical studies and cognate disciplines. I would envision this to include Ancient Near East, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Christian Origins/New Testament, Intertestamental/Second Temple literature (e.g., LXX, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, etc.), Patristics, among other things.

If you want to look at a couple examples of other carnivals, see the History Carnival XXI or Christian Carnival 100.

I would be happy to help organize it and perhaps do the first one to get it going again — unless , of course, there are other volunteers.

So what do you all think? If we could get a number of people committed for the next six months, then we could get it well established. Please either email me your thoughts or comment on this post.

Today’s Globe and Mail has an op/ed piece by Dan Falk entitled, “Did spin doctors write the Bible?” While it has a catchy title, the article does nothing more than rehash the typical “minimalists say this, maximalists say this” sort of argument while drawing some modern political implications.

Here is an excerpt:

It wasn’t long ago that the Bible was read not just as an inspirational and remarkable collection of stories, but as history — if not a literal account of the Israelite people, then at least a somewhat reliable dramatization.

But that confidence has eroded over the past century, and in the past decade it has nearly been destroyed. Abraham and Moses, it now seems, probably never lived at all. David and Solomon may have been tribal leaders with good PR, not great kings presiding over a vast empire.

The debate has become sharply polarized. On one side are “minimalists,” who dismiss the biblical narrative as a fiction constructed for political and ideological reasons many centuries after the events they claim to describe. Opposing them are “maximalists,” who assert that much of the narrative should be read as real history. And frequently, the fight really seems to be about present-day politics in the Middle East.

What I find interesting is that the “maximalists” are described as maintaining that “much of the narrative should be read as real history.” Is this really the case? What does “real history” mean? While there are definitely some who would want to read the historical accounts in the Bible as straightforward historical accounts of what actually happened, most if not all of the scholars active on both sides of the debate would not agree. It seems to me that it is more a matter of degree. While virtually everyone agrees that the biblical texts can be valuable historigraphic sources for the period in which they were purportedly written (e.g., Persian period or later), the question is whether or not they can be used to reconstruct earlier periods.

Lemche, Davies, and others would argue that they are not reliable as such (even though they would both agree that biblical texts like Samuel and Kings preserve some vaild pre-exilic historical information), while others would argue that the biblical historical books should not be relegated to the status of “secondary” historical sources (contra Lemche) but may be used critically and judicisouly as a source for reconstructing the history of Israel. Few “maximalist” scholars would maintain that the biblical texts “should be read as real history” — at least if one is to assume that by “real history” Falk means a straightforward play-by-play of what actually happened, i.e., the objective “scientific” history.

At any rate, the article is worth a read.